 Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube. Covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. I'm here in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. The flagship program will go out to the events and instruct the signal from those. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris. I've had two great guests here from a century. Pat Sullivan, Global Oracle Technology Lead and Terry Straus, Managing Director, Global Oracle. Practice lead for Accenture. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So Terry, tell us the big announcement today. Not off the reservation. It's kind of predicted. You can connect the dots. The business practice of the Oracle Business Group for Accenture. Now taking on infrastructure service. It's a serious validation now because it's kind of the final piece of the puzzle for Oracle. Absolutely. Looking good off the tee so far. Middle of the fairway, as they say. But now people were questioning the infrastructure as a service. And now you think it's ready? Tell us. I think it's ready. Well, we're very excited about Oracle's announcement and particularly about their managed service program at the MSB. What we announced today is that we are the first global systems integrator to be part of that program. And we have also announced that we're adding infrastructure as a service to our Accenture Oracle Business Group. Which is a strategic go to market with Oracle. All about accelerating our clients to the cloud faster at less risk. So it's not new. Take a minute to explain. When was it founded? And what is it in tail specific? What's the charter? It was not new this year. No, it's definitely not new. Take a minute to explain that. Exactly. The Accenture Oracle Business Group was actually launched April of 2015. And it was launched again as a strategic go to market with Oracle. Committed investments and resources all about what our clients wanted. Which was acceleration to the cloud, lower risk, and again, very fast. So that was again 2015 in April. But it was launched with just SaaS and pass. So what we're really happy about is we could extend AOBG, which we affectionately call the Accenture Oracle Business Group. We now can add infrastructure as a service to that offering. And the acceleration with customers. What's the uptake? What's the vibe? Feedback? I'm sure you've beta tested this and got some AB testing going on. You guys are Accenture. I'm sure there's analytics behind it. What's the results of the before the announcement? What made you go here? Well, sure. First off, the Accenture Oracle Business Group has been pretty successful in its inaugural year. So we've added 70 clients across the globe to this new partnership with Oracle. All cloud based, which is great. And so with infrastructure as a service, you bet. We did take a look at it pretty deeply and tested out and we were very impressed with the performance, the price for performance, as well as the speed that it came with. So that we're building into our portfolio now and building some solutions around it. The infrastructure serves. We had a little debate earlier. Juan was just talking about the database, but others like Chuck Hollis was on earlier. Some analysts say, oh, it was a reboot of infrastructure service. Some would say, no, it's in realignment with the bare metal. So there's a lot of moving parts when you start to get into the enterprise. I mean, public cloud is pretty straightforward. You know, rack and stack and some cloud somewhere and just provision stuff. Negative elastic. But in the enterprise, what was the key thing that Oracle had to do to get this milestone completed? Was it the bare metal component? What was specifically about it now that made you guys go, okay, we're ready to bring it to the Accenture fold and take it to market? I think if you look at it, John, just in terms of data, there's Oracle owns more of the world's data running on their databases. And just from that piece alone, the question we were looking at is, did we think Oracle would make their cloud to run their database the best? And they did. So when you look at it from that segment and how their database... You mean their hardware's up to snuff. They had the right stuff. Absolutely. ...before much was good. It took a lot of what they did in Exadata and they're now applying that to their infrastructure and compute cloud. Historically Accenture has gone to a client to help them pick the application and implement it to the application on-premise. So is this, in many respects, about going to the client, helping them pick the application, but then giving them the option of whether or not they want to do it on-premise in the cloud? Is that a big part of it? Frankly, we take a cloud-first mentality to our clients. We feel that going to the cloud provides both the price that they're looking for in many ways, as well as the functionality. And so we go with the cloud-first mentality. Now, many of our clients also... They may not be ready, so we will help them to get to the landing spot that they feel most comfortable with. But we lead with cloud. These are still very, very complex applications when I think a lot of people forget sometimes they associate the cloud with simple. And it's not that we can't make the applications more simple, but really you're still bringing the domain and application expertise to bear whatever the implementation style. Are you also then looking at how clients that have historically been on-premise can start moving their stuff to the clouds with you and modernize along the way? I was going to say the keyword is modernized, as opposed to lift and shift. So as you move to the cloud, what can you do to improve your enterprise? You know, to automate more and actually, like I said, rationalize and modernize your applications as you move them. I think modernize is the right word. So John's been asking, virtually everybody that's come on, a really excellent question. Namely, is Oracle going to take a sweet mentality and close it down, or is Oracle going to take some other type of mentality, APIs, and allow the ecosystem to continue to add value? From Accenture's standpoint, how do you think clients are looking at the modernization problem? Are they moving with new technologies and hoping that it stays available, or a lot of partners can add value to it, or are you seeing them looking to simplify and start to close it down? Well, that's why we launched the business group in the first place. It's because we wanted to give our clients the choice, but most importantly, we knew that we had to help our clients create the industry solutions that they need that's not available from the cloud. So the ability for us to actually purpose-build those and then repeat those across the industry to other-like clients, I think that's the key in terms of the choice that's available and what we can do with it. So you're a risk factor, but also you're also, I used the word major D before we came on, but in reality, they want someone to walk them down the path, if you will, because I think there's still some unknown questions, right? Am I getting that right? I don't want to oversimplify it, but I'm a big enterprise. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by overplaying my hand or getting ahead of my skis or whatever metaphor we use. I mean, is that consistent with what you're seeing? Absolutely. And I think the part of the service we provide that Accenture could provide is really providing that journey, that roadmap to the cloud. What do you do first? What do you do second? It is complex. You know, and actually, you know, I think as Accenture, we flourish where there's complexity, right? Because we help our clients sort of simplify all that complexity and help them, you know, march forward again in this case to the cloud and do things in the right order in the right way. I want to get your thoughts as Peter made an observation on our opening segment today. You know, the acceleration with cloud native, certainly we had an Asia Pacific panel earlier on and mobile, especially mobile and cloud native, there's really is no complex bare method environment in mostly in China and other areas. But they put the pressure on the speed of the customer themselves, not so much the vendors and the suppliers in the space who may have great technology now. It really comes back down to the customer ability to move culturally and or inertia. Absolutely. Can you add some color around that? It's a little nuanced conversation, but it speaks to kind of the self assessment of the customer CXO or whoever and saying, are we ready? Can you share any insight and color around that dynamic? Laura, is that true? It is true. There's a lot of things that go into it, right? So there's still a lot of requirements that our clients have, whether that be around security or we talk about data sovereignty and things like it. But the adoption piece is big as well. So there's a starting point. What our interest is is working with the clients to figure out where that starting point is. But I think the big thing that we've been doing a lot of is assessing how ready are you to move to the cloud? What do you have today? And is that available in the cloud? Yeah. So you have to answer those questions first before you can have that comfort to start to move. So you had 70 customers. I saw the press release about 70 customers in your overall year. Is that customers overall? Is that Oracle customers? That's Oracle? Those are Oracle customers that are taking advantage of the Accenture Oracle business group. So migrating their legacy applications to one or more of Oracle's cloud applications. How would you put the buckets of distribution of kinds of apps in those 70 customers? Tire kicking, full deployments, rollouts, shift over. Definitely beyond tire kicking. I'd say maybe half our single pillar and the other half are multiple pillar. HCM and ERP, ERP and CX. So multiples and a large number of those also include the past components as well. Fortune 500, 10 billion in size kind of companies. That's our typical target base with Accenture but also I'd say upper, mid to certainly the enterprise level. Absolutely. That's so sizable so we heard earlier that Oracle's got 430,000 clients, 15 million users for at least one of the silos. They have 52,000 Oracle certified, I think. 52,000 Oracle's practitioners and another 20,000 Java practitioners as well. I made Java's? About 20,000. Yeah, pretty much everybody. Hey, I heard JSON and Java's pretty hot, huh? With 70 clients, that can probably, that's pretty close to representing maybe 3 to 6% of the big, big, big Oracle shops out there. That's pretty good. Yeah, we're very pleased. I've been trying to understand the Oracle Partner Network because it's been always a moving train because it's so big and it has a lot of things but one of the things that we've been seeing with the Partner Network is on the global partners you start to see these swim lanes develop within Accenture, Deloitte, your competition. What's the one thing that Accenture does well that's unique now because I'm not trying to pin you against competition but you start to see the huge, it's so much beach head. There's plenty of fruit for everyone out in those trees and there's the cloud land out there so it doesn't seem as competitive as it used to be. You know, you've got PwC does their thing kind of back to the old days, you know. Like, is there a specialism that you guys see develop in Accenture that's unique, that makes you different than everybody else? Absolutely, right? Oh, yeah, I was just saying. Oh, no, we ain't just one. Really, I'm going to give you a list and then I'll probably add to it. Well, Deloitte will say they do this better than you. I'm looking for the one thing that makes you different. Well, I don't know that there's one. There isn't one, but at Accenture, first of all, our client's always first, right? So whatever, what our client values, so client number one, but we lead through our industries, right? So our industry acumen, you know, we believe our clients desperately want from their systems integrator and then we couple it with, I believe, the deepest technology capabilities, in this case, Oracle's cloud and the two combined. Additionally, we have a very large delivery engine, our offshore organization, you know, so that we can, which actually does much of our innovation for us, so that we can take that delivery engine, combine it with the likes of AOBG and our industry skills, and deliver to our clients, again, lower risk and with acceleration and with that automation and innovation that they're looking for. Pat, what did I say? Well, I would kind of summarize a lot of it because our product at Accenture is our people and we take great pride in bringing the best people that we can in this space and we've been doing that pretty well and so as Oracle continues to evolve and move to the cloud, we're bringing the best people or training our people to make sure that we can answer the market. Accenture is very customer-focused, too, I noticed. I would say that you vary customer and you have the biggest parties, that's for sure. All the events I go to, we go to all the events. Accenture has always been the best. You always have the best parties. And that's something you put on the literature, but how would you sum up Oracle Open World so far this year for folks who couldn't make it who are watching the live stream? What's the vibe? What's the big news here? Well, to me, the big news is that they've rounded out their cloud with infrastructure, the service. I couldn't be more excited, not just for my business but for what now we can bring to our clients. And what you can support now, too, the support side. Absolutely right, absolutely. Thanks so much for taking the time to share the announcement news, congratulations and we're looking forward to seeing it at the big Accenture parties maybe later tonight or next event. Absolutely, absolutely. See you at the partner network conference. Thanks for sharing. This is theCUBE here live in San Francisco inside the show floor. Big booth, theCUBE. Oracle Open, we'll be right back.